Another wacky website for you to check out: Wordle. It takes a chunk of text, a blog URL or RSS feed and creates a word cloud with the most frequently used words. You can also customize the color, layout, and font in a million different ways* to come up with a cloud you can call your own. Here’s mine:

You now have an outlet for altruistic word learning: Free Rice, where every word you learn equals a donation of rice to feed the world’s hungry.

I stopped after 2000 grains of rice and a vocabulary level that at one point reached 43 (though it didn’t stay there for long). After you give it a try, let me know how many grains you donated and how high your vocabulary level reached.

I can see this as the start of something huge: FreeRice.com – Improve your vocabulary to end world hunger!

We are going to be getting something quite fun for Christmas this year. It’s entirely possible that we will need professional help to ween ourselves from it because I have the feeling that we will be involved with it into the wee hours of the morning. We don’t want to say exactly what we are getting ourselves into, but if we haven’t given away what we are getting for Christmas yet, then I don’t think we should really say anything more.

Finally, I hope you can imagine Starbucks how it looks from inside. If you want to hang out with your friends, wife, girlfriend, and boyfriend you have to try this place.

From a student’s paper (emphasis added) describing an interesting location. I think he may not have realized quite the possibly violent entourage he was inadvertently assembling for a trip to get some joe.

The lesson for English language learners: never organize a trip for your wife and your girlfriend and your boyfriend at the same time. It just gets a bit awkward.

So, as you are probably aware by now, I really enjoy putting up here some of the unexpected things my kids sometimes say. It’s loads of fun for me and, I believe, will be fun for them when they are old enough to appreciate their own development and past.

Recently, I came back across a video that I had watched some time ago. One of probably most famous photographers on Flickr, _rebekka, put this little claymation video together as part of her university studies. The animation is done to the audio recording of an actual conversation that her two sons, ages 4 and 6, had at one point.

The animation is marvelous and fun, and the conversation is classic little boy.

Oh, and it’s in Icelandic, with subtitles, which makes it, for this linguist, really rock.